Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1969) projecting the impact of evolving technologies and social trends was a seminal work. While it was as gripping as a sci-fi novel by Asimov (Ii am partial to him over Arthur C Clark), the implications were profound. He was prophetic in many aspects and some of the trends that he foresaw are still playing out.
Future shock came at a departure point for the global society in more than one sense. it was the beginning of the end of American status as the sole super power, a time for civil movements across the world, colonial powers waning and colonies across Africa and Asia grappling with the need to assert the new emerging independent identities. It was also the time of the Flower children/Hippie movement/youth rebellion across continental Europe and the USA and the Beatles.
We are currently on the cusp of another revolution of a similar kind. Millennials and Gen Z are very different to earlier generations. The first decade of the 21st century has less in common with the century that we left behind and more an indicator and weather cock of the oncoming 90 years.
VUCA, SMAC, IOT, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence are the words one hears frequently today. While society at large and institutions/organisations are grappling with the impact and implications of these developments, the combined impact of these and the dramatic changes that are sweeping societies across the globe are not yet fully understood.
What next
Being a business school professor for almost three decades, the attempt here is to look at what these developments mean to organisations and consequently business management education. The framework used here to look at the impact of these developments on business and organisations is the ‘Strategy-Structure-Systems paradigm’ propagated by Harvard over the ‘Purpose-People-Process paradigm’ popularised by the late Sumantra Ghosal.
What is going to happen to Strategy and Strategising?
How do we look at strategising in the Flipkart/Amazon world ? Even the smartest of people from the best of the VC/PE firms are not talking about profits or breakeven. They are only interested in knowing how fast you can scale, no matter how much money you burn along the way!
How relevant is the positional school approach of Michael Porter or the resource based views of strategy of the later school?
How are we going to organise collective efforts?
I have recently taken up an assignment with an IT major and I work with a cross section of people whom I have never met and in many cases may never meet them. Work is going on fine. I am sure many of you youngsters are more familiar and comfortable with such a scenario. Not only has ICT brought in situations where people located across the globe work together but work effectively too. Modern businesses are more or less ‘done’ with hierarchies.
Planning and review
This is the inevitable consequence of the knowledge economy and knowledge worker culture. Flexi hours are more common than the exception. People are increasingly going to refuse to commit to being ‘monopolised’ (work contracts that bind you to one organisation), organisations are getting flatter by the day and middle-level managers are discovering that they are not required any more. Classical knowledge/theory/frameworks of organisational behaviour and human resource management are struggling to help cope.
How are we going to plan/monitor and review?
Today’s VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world doesn't give the management the luxury of a plan at the top and to implement at leisure. Planning and execution have to be parallel and cannot be separated. The days of smart kids in ivory towers doing the strategising without the responsibility to implement, which gets passed on to the ‘Grunts’, is over. Besides, the rapidity and quantum of data that can be generated by modern IT tools (be it social/ Mobile/ Analytics/ Cloud, popularly acronymed as SMAC or IOT, the internet of things) is beyond the realms of the capability of the management to process. Data is just exploding at an exponential rate to the extent that there is a new disease that is doing the rounds called DRIP — data rich insight poor. How do organisations cope with these? What kind of systems do they need for monitoring and reviews?
I intend taking up these three aspects over the next three instalments. The final fourth piece would be on ‘what do all these changes mean to business education and business schools where there is an entrenched legacy in the form of a traditional approach to management that is increasingly becoming irrelevant to the emerging order of the world. Given that academics resist change the most, the challenges faced by a business school’s leadership is even bigger than business leaders.